Live long and prosper

I'm having a bit of a clear out. Eating 5 a day, drinking lots of water. Choosing the better food option when things are available. I eat fresh home cooked food anyway and I've virtually given up on alcohol all together. Small changes.

I even thought about taking more exercise. Until I read this. I'm supposed to do five hours of exercise a week. I'd be happy to take a 30 minute stroll a few times a week, do a bit of gardening and play on my nintendo wii. But this means I need to go mad. It's the single most offputting piece of health advice ever put across. It says if you want to maintain weight you're in for it and forget it if you want to permanently lose weight.

Say I live for another 40 years. This means I need to spend 87 days solid doing exercise. That's a quarter of a year or 0.6 % of my remaining life. I know what you'll say; the benefits far outweigh the effort. I'll live far extra than 87 days, I'll have healthier later years (apart from the hip replacement I'll need from running) and I might even enjoy exercise and feel happier and more energetic. But the thought of pulling on my running shoes on those dark cold winter evenings or coming out of the swimming baths when it's blowing an ice cold gale or jumping out of the car on a sweltering hot day to go back out running makes me depressed.

Harriet Harman

The equality minister Harriet Harman is planning to make it legal to discriminate against people in a job interview. If you are a white male and you are up against a woman or a person from an ethnic minority of equal ability then it will be perfectly legal for them to turn you down because of your gender or the colour of your skin. This is grossly unfair on the person being denied a job. In all situations the best person for the job should be chosen. It is never the case that there are two candidates of identical ability that can't be distinguished after a second interview.

Harriet Harman declared that she was the best person to be deputy PM because she was a woman. It certainly wasn't because she was the best person for the job. She has been a disaster in parliament and has long been considered as an over promoted New Labour appparatchik who agrees with whatever the party line is. Harman became "the politician we all love to hate" during her tenure as social security minister when she carried through widely unpopular lone parent cuts affecting mostly women. She sent her kids to a selective school far away from her constituency. Her voting record is; voted no to a transparent Parliament, voted for introducing ID cards, voted for introducing foundation hospitals, voted for introducing student top-up fees, voted for Labour's anti-terrorism laws and 42 days, VOTED FOR THE IRAQ WAR, voted against investigating the Iraq war, voted for replacing Trident (cost £20bn). In 1990 Harman co-authored a report entitled "The Family Way". It criticised the family unit and mothers who stay at home. In particular it questioned whether men were an asset to families at all and whether "the presence of fathers in families is necessarily a means to social harmony and cohesion". Critics such as Erin Pizzey described such statements as a "staggering attack on men and their role in modern life". She wore a stab vest to walk around the streets of her constituency. She accepted illegal donations to her campaign to become deputy pm. In 2003 Harman was fined £400 and banned from driving for seven days after being convicted of driving at 99 mph (159 km/h) on a motorway, 29 mph (47 km/h) above the speed limit.

Energy Costs

The cost of cleaning up after the last generation of nuclear power plants could rise as high as £73bn. This has to be paid by the taxpayer. The next generation of nuclear power plants has already been approved. The government has decided our future is nuclear.

The cost of completing the national grid so it runs all the way from Scotland to Southern England and then onto France is about £4bn, which includes wind farms in Scotland. The idea is we could be a net exporter of energy within a generation. Britain is blessed with amazing wind and wave energy resources. We also have a commitment to cut our greenhouse gases and increase the proportion of our energy from renewable sources. That process has started but most serious proposals are stuck in the planning process and very few make it through.

Here is my plan;

1) Approve a mix of big and small projects
2) Streamline the planning process and be biased toward green energy schemes
3) Add incentives for communities that host wind farms
4) Allow any user to sell energy back to the grid at a fair price; feed in tariffs

Above all just do SOMETHING and do it NOW. The Germans are far in front of us

Margaret Thatcher

As a person who grew up in a Yorkshire mining region in the 1980s my natural inclination is to hate Thatcherism because of the misery it caused for me personally and for many many others. However, the recent spate of programmes on TV has made me rethink. Here are one two interesting articles that offer opposing views.

The balance seems to be that although she made some calamitous mistakes and our entry into the Falklands war looks like downright evil political opportunism with hindsight, her economic and social reforms were a bitter pill that did transform the country into a lean mean modern machine. This is why New Labour didn't drop any of her major policies. It is also why in the space of one generation I went from being destined to work in a coal mine to taking a place at University and earning a PhD.

Motoring gripes

Manchester is thinking about congestion charging and the government is smiling on it. Businesses are up in arms and there is much debate. The M60 motorway is to be included in the plans. I vehemently disagree with this idea. Why should I be charged to drive past Manchester on my way to somewhere else? How else am I supposed to get to Liverpool or Warrington (which I have to do occasionally)? OK, tax those going into Manc but not those who are using one of the key motorway routes in the north of England. The idea seems to be half baked. With a looming recession and motoring costs hitting the roof the last thing we need is more tax on motorists. Trying to price us off the road is not fair for two reasons; 1) those who are poor should not be prevented from travelling on certain routes 2) People have to use the road. When I drive to Warrington to do my experiments the boot is full of scientific kit. I can't take that on a train! Also, with the housing market being batsh*t crazy people can't afford to live near where they work and even if they can the jobs market is so short term people don't stay living near their workplace for long.

Motoring gripe number two; speeding. The number one killer in the world is traffic - car crashes, people being run over and particularly pollution. Cars that are speeding produce more pollution and are more likely to collide with something or someone and the effects of that collision are more serious. So why aren't all vehicles fitted with speed limiters? These would prevent a vehicle from reaching more than a certain top speed. Some vehicles already have them fitted by law and with some small investment in infrastructure all vehicles could be fitted with a speed limiter that could sense the local speed limit and restrain the speed of the car. I can't think of a single good argument against the idea except for the initial costs. The benefits would be immense. Even for motorists. Fewer traffic jams caused by vehicles doing gas/brake cycles and causing phantom jams. And just think about pulling out at a junction. To leave my housing estate I have to pull onto a road with a 30 mph speed limit. Except the vehicles are just dropping down from 40 mph (ie doing 50 mph) and I can't get out. Of course, the real reason we don't have speed limiters for all vehicles is the motoring lobby. A £60'000 car would be no different to a fiat punto except for a few more creature comforts and a bit more acceleration (but with a flat top speed to aim for who cares?). There is no way the oil lobby and the motoring lobby would take it. And their voice is far more powerful than that of the millions who die each year on the roads.

Grand Theft Auto IV

Much has been written about the 'seminal masterpiece' computer game grand theft auto iv which has just been released. In this game a person plays the role of a criminal in a virtual city. One of the key attractions of the game is its 'sandbox' gameplay; if you choose you can ignore the missions and just hang out in the city. You can watch TV, eat chicken ignore stop signs and red lights. You can also go on a murderous rampage with a baseball bat or fill innocent bystanders with lead. Defenders of this say that it is just tongue in cheek fun and a bit of stress relief. Any sane person can distinguish the game from reality. Why should we all be denied access to something fun just because there are a few vulnerable and suggestive people out there?

Which is exactly the same argument the pro-gun lobby make in the USA.

New Orleans vs Sichuan

The chinese government, with its appaling human rights record, has done more to help the victims of the Sichuan earthquake than the US government did to help the victims of hurricane Katrina in New Orleans. It might be that the Olympics and the world spotlight have forced China to act but the fact that China has acted so swiftly and that New Orleans is still in pieces should surely put Bush to shame. But it doesn't seem to have.

Microsoft and children in the developing world

The makers of the $100 laptop designed to give thousands of kids from the developing world access to a vital learning tool have announced that the Microsoft Windows XP operating system will now be supplied with the laptop alongside the free (and in my experience, far superior) Linux operating system. Users will be able to choose which operating system they want to use just after they switch on the laptop. The cost of the laptop has risen to $188 because the company involved can't demand that a country order a minimum number of laptops. With Windows XP the cost of the laptop has risen by a further $10 to $198, double the initial cost which means half as many kids will get their laptop. The project has also suffered delays because it has taken 1 year to adapt Windows XP to go on the machine. Even so the user interface doesn't work on Windows XP and the networking software that lets users talk to one another and share data also doesn't work. Scandal and shame.

Why are they letting big business in to profit from such a beautiful and altruistic NOT-FOR-PROFIT scheme? Because the users want it. The number of orders placed since Windows XP was made available has increased. I wonder how much pressure was placed on the governments of the countries placing orders. Of course, we all know that MS aren't in this because of education. They want to make sure their operating system and their software becomes dominant in the new markets in the developing world. This situation is akin to the companies who distribute free powdered milk to mothers in the developing world and then stop the free samples when the mothers natural milk dries up, forcing them to pay for the milk. Microsoft will raise a generation of children on Windows and then when they are adults they will be forced to use it and pay for it (out of familiarity, the same reason Windows is till dominant everywhere else), instead of taking advantages of all the goodness of FREE open source software.

Sainsburys beware

The UK supermarket Sainsburys has reported a 28% increase in its profits this year. Now, I know they are one of the big nasty supermarket chains but I'm quite pleased about this. I was, for many years a Tesco customer partly out of laziness and partly because of the clubcard. But I got fed up of sub-standard fruit and veg and awful meat (see my post from almost a year ago). So I switched to Sainsburys. I travelled the extra few miles to their store and paid a few pence extra and got less of a reward for my loyalty (nectar points aren't as valuable as clubcard points). It was worth it for the better food. And I'm delighted and surprised that lots of other people have made the switch in a time when food prices have been rising fast. Sainsburys concentrate mainly on food but they have decided to reinvest the profits in the non-food side of the business. Boo. Concentrate on maintaining the quality of your food and you will maintain your profit margins (and your customers). Tesco took their eye off the ball and started selling crap food a year and a half ago so they could concentrate on their USA operations and their non-food lines and look what happened. I said it a year ago for Tesco and I'll repeat it again today; Sainsburys beware.

Apropos of not much really...

The Popular project (over on Freaky Trigger), which is reviewing all UK number 1 singles in order, is on great form at the moment. It's just hit September 1976, with the number 1 in question being Dancing Queen which has earned a big fat 10 out of 10.

I like Dancing Queen, but I like Chiquitita better. It's a song that stops and then starts again, which are always ace, and it features Bjorn playing the piano with great gusto. I have no idea what it's about but it sounds sad, in a kind of European melodramatic way (see also Fernando). So here's a lovely snowy video for it.



Niczilla xx

Carbon footprint of football matches

It's music festival season and there has been much comment about the carbon footprint of such events. Many tens of thousands of people travelling many miles to attend surely do create a lot of CO2 (and pollution, which seems to have been pushed down the pecking order of things to worry about by greenhouse gases). Events like glastonbury have made a certain number of tickets available only to those who travel there by bus. Bands like Radiohead are only playing at venues with good public transport links.

All very good. But... The last round of premier league football matches was attended by about 365'000 people. There are 38 such rounds in a season which adds up to just under 14 million people per year attending matches. The Championship (the second most highly attended football league in the world) gets about 5 million attendees a year if last weekend is anything to go by (bear in mind it is end of season which attracts more fans but weigh this against declining attendance figures across football). A lot of football fans don't travel far to the match but some fans travel a long way (Man Utd fans). Even so, we are talking a good proportion of 20 million people are travelling to football matches each year. This must dwarf the music festivals in terms of CO2 generated.

Favourite poll result of the week; 15% of Americans think Barak Obama is a muslim.

Medicine balance of the sexes

There are more women than men graduating medical school. Is this a problem? Radio 4 debated this question this morning.

A male doctor made the point that there should be equal numbers of male and female doctors available to fit with patient choice and general equality. To satisfy this need one has to train 3 female doctors for every 2 male doctors. This is because female doctors retire earlier, work fewer hours and require maternity leave. Surely this logic requires more female doctors to be trained in a ratio 3:2?

A female doctor said 'it isn't true you get three times more work out of male doctors' which shows she didn't understand the point made by her colleague. Her final sentence is my quote for the day;

11% of female clinical academics are women

Could Have Been Worse

EMI are to release a Best of Radiohead on June 2 as revenge for the band ditching the record company. The tracklisting and artwork have just landed;

Single album;|||||||||||||||||||Double album; single album plus extra CD

Just||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||Airbag
Paranoid Android|||||||||||||||I Might Be Wrong
Karma Police|||||||||||||||||||Go To Sleep
Creep|||||||||||||||||||||||||||Let Down
No Surprises|||||||||||||||||||Planet Telex
High and Dry||||||||||||||||||Exit Music (For A Film)
My Iron Lung||||||||||||||||||The National Anthem
There There|||||||||||||||||||Knives Out
Lucky|||||||||||||||||||||||||||Talk Show Host
Fake Plastic Trees|||||||||||||You
Idioteque||||||||||||||||||||||Anyone Can Play Guitar
2+2=5||||||||||||||||||||||||||How To Disappear Completely
The Bends|||||||||||||||||||||True Love Waits
Pyramid Song
Street Spirit (Fade Out)
Everything In Its Right Place

I can't really argue with the track list but the running order produces some very odd transitions. Also, 'How To Dissappear' should be on CD 1 because it is one of the top 5 Radiohead songs. Other than that this makes a reasonable introduction to RH. The problem is they are an album band and you can't really cut and shut the albums to get the 'best bits'.

Anyway, as a long time fan I won't buy this album because it is just EMI being greedy. I can make my own RH greatest hits playlist on my ipod and change this every couple months. What the fans really want is a b-sides collection or a boxed set. Now that would be something exciting. Almost exciting as seing them live (again) at the end of June this year (3 months to go!).

Say No to 42 days

The latest great idea from the Government to stop terrorism is to make it legal to hold people and question them repeatedly for 42 days without charge - without even telling them why they are being held. The Equality and Human Rights Commission says it goes against human rights law and may breach the Race Relations Act, while Geoffrey Dear, former chief constable of West Midlands Police and HM inspector of constabulary says passing the law will be a PR coup for Al Qaeda

The Rachel from North London blog explains all this better than I can, so please have a read of her thoughts on this and then go to http://petitions.pm.gov.uk/notadaylonger/ and sign the petition against 42 Days which a)threatens our civil rights and b) won't do the slightest bit of good in 'the war against terror'anyway. Please take a minute to sign, not because I asked and not because a load of bloggers are going on about it, but because it's the right thing to do.
Niczilla xx

Doncaster Quality Bus Corridor

Doncaster is currently having a quality bus corridor fitted on two approaches into the town centre. On one of these approaches a dual carriageway is being reduced to one lane and this Sunday (normally a quiet day) I encountered very bad traffic. Of course this will all be worth it if traffic levels are reduced and everyone uses the bus. I asked the mayors office what the traffic reduction and bus passenger increases they were hoping for and how much the scheme would cost. They said

I would advise that the major scheme business case that secured funding of £15.3 million from the Department of Transport, is based upon achieving a 5% increase in bus patronage in the opening year, and an annual increase of 1.5% thereafter.

That's it. £15 million to increase bus passenger levels by just 5% and no targets for traffic reduction. 5% more people using the bus will cut congestion a bit but the bus lanes themselves will create much more congestion than they ease.

I would also like to know if taxi cabs are to be allowed to use the bus lanes. A taxi is a private commercial vehicle and they should not be allowed to use the priority traffic lights to the delay of everyone else. This is where the main congestion comes from; the priority lights. Each time a vehicle passes down the bus lane toward the lights the main body of traffic is halted. In the town centre we have priority lights which cause chaos. We also have priority bus lanes into the bus station which the buses do not use because people prefer to be dropped off in the town centre. However, we haven't been able to gauge the effects of the priority lights in the new bus corridor yet because the buses are not running in any numbers. Why? Because they haven't built the park and ride yet.

You heard me correct. We have bus lanes built and empty because they haven't built the park and ride yet. Why didn't they build it first?

In the peaceful eye of the storm (for now)

Democracy 0 MPs 1 (2)?

Today is a crucial day for Democracy in the UK. Parliament is to debate the EU treaty. The people of Britain want a referendum. The government know that the outcome of the referendum would be that the people would reject the treaty (as part of a wider rejection of EU authority over British citizens and the subsequent dilution of our democratic rights). So the government has rejected the idea of a referendum even though they were elected on the promise (in their manifesto) that the people would be granted a referendum. They claim that the treay now isn't the same treaty on which the referendum promise was made which is complete hogwash. Those who redrafted the treaty themselves admit this. It all boils down to the simple fact that the pro-Europe stance of parliament is completely out of touch with the feelings of the people. We are being denied our say because the government believe we lack enough knowledge of the situation to be involved in the decision making.

The simple fact is that we don't want to be ruled over by mainland Europe. We fought in two wars to prevent European integration. Europe as a trade zone is a great idea. Europe sticking together in its dealings with the superpowers makes sense. But a federal Europe with a single currency and a central law making and governmental institution is too far. The politicians want to go all the way. Why? An increase in government and bureaucracy (and in power and budgets) is what they want. Government bureaucrats measure their success by the size of their workforce and budgets. Anyway. Please parliament let us decide. You ignored millions of us over the pre-Iraq war protests and we were right. We couldn't vote the government out of power to protest this because the alternatives were the Tories (no way) or the Lib Dems (not a serious proposition). Another failure of party politics (see earlier post). Don't let this be the second time in recent years that the overwhelming will of the people has been brushed aside. I could be wrong. A referendum could reveal public opinion to be in favour of Europe. Either way. Give us our say.

Traffic hell (again and again)

This morning I had an important appointment to keep (a timeslot booked on a microscope at the York nanocentre). My usual commute takes 45 minutes. An hour and twenty minutes before I had to be there I checked the traffic news; my normal motorway route was down to one lane and the queues were already 7 miles long. I was immediately filled with panic that I was going to be late. With an hour and ten minutes to go I set off along an alternative route that was shorter by distance but on smaller, lower speed limit roads. I arrived twenty minutes late and lost a quarter of my microscope time. This is the second time this week that the A1 motorway has gone down. Today was not as bad as monday but the delays still caused a 12 mile tailback and 2 hour delays for those determined to plough through.

There are simply too many vehicles on the roads. People cannot live near where they work because of the nature of the housing and jobs market. A couple who live in Doncaster might individually have jobs in Leeds and Sheffield and their home is a halfway point. Homes are expensive too and difficult to sell so people can't always live in their choice location. The authorities don't make things easier. There seem to be very few contingency plans for when one of the motorways in Yorkshire goes down. The diversions don't seem to work. One day in 2005 the M1 was closed so they diverted onto the A1 which got blocked by an accident and then the last escape route, the M18, was blocked by an accident. The resulting jams I will never forget.

So in a week like this what do we need? What we don't need is Doncaster council conducting a traffic census on one of the approach roads that feeds the A1 motorway and central Doncaster itself. They forced the road to one lane and slowed this down as they called people over to get a sample of travelling habits. Result; tailbacks for miles and miles and miles back into South Yorkshire. Idiots. Not a good idea to make the rush hour worse, especially considering the commuting hell that this week has brought.

Criminally underrated albums

1. Monster (R.E.M.)
2. One Hot Minute (Red Hot Chili Peppers)
3. Hail To The Thief (Radiohead)
4. John Wesley Harding (Bob Dylan)
5. Fables Of The Reconstruction (R.E.M.)

Thank you

This morning my 45 minute commute to work took 3 hours. The A1 motorway was closed due to a bad accident and the knock on effects on surrounding motorways caused 20 mile tailbacks. There was no indication that the motorway was closed ahead until I hit the wall of traffic. If I'd known I wouldn't have got on the motorway and would have gone the long way round. The local TV news didn't even carry the warning which is most unlike them. Given that the accident happened in the early hours which gave plenty of time for the services to get organised I'm a bit miffed.

I queued for about 20 miles along country back roads to go around to join another motorway. In the small villages we passed through there were no police marshalling people through. In fact lots of small stretches of roadworks caused even worse bottlenecks. The workmen could have just put a road plate over the holes in the road and shut down their roadworks for the day (I know this because I used to do roadworks). The traffic light sequences weren't changed either. So in the one direction you had a half mile queue made up of local traffic and in the other direction a 20 mile queue of thousands and thousands of stranded drivers. Why isn't there a traffic flow contingency for such days. When one motorway in south yorkshire is hit the whole road network goes down. Grrr.